"LawAtlas gave us a very logical, easy way to collect and organize that information, and it provided the framework for teaching more lessons about systematic data collection and laws for research." Our local department of public health was applying for accreditation, and they reached out to me for help cataloging their public health laws. Part of the health department’s responsibility under the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) is not only to find out what is going on in their jurisdiction, but also how they can improve. They came to me saying, “We have to do this, but we don’t know how.”
Micah’s story:
I had the students collect the law in four primary topic areas that were of interest to the health department (bicycle and motorcycle safety, school wellness policies, complete streets legislation, and infectious disease and emergency response), compare those practices to best practices in the field, and then present ideas to the health department about how they could improve.
LawAtlas gave us a very logical, easy way to collect and organize that information, and it provided the framework for teaching more lessons about systematic data collection and laws for research.
It was terrific in terms of letting the interdisciplinary collaboration happen. The public health students had a better sense of data collection and coding, which was a concept that was completely unfamiliar to law students. At the same time, public health students had no clue where to even look for laws, and how to track down laws from local jurisdictions. It was a good exercise to get them to pool knowledge and resources.
It got them thinking about law in a different way. In law school, students typically think about statutory drafting in isolation, without thinking about how it operates in either space or time, so it got them thinking about the diffusion of law over geographical areas. It was a great opportunity to talk about the impact of law on the public and the challenges for assessing that impact. And the same from the public health side: they learn a lot of epidemiology and surveillance, but few courses talk about law as an input into that surveillance.
PHAB guidelines suggest that it should be health departments who are tracking what happens in their jurisdiction, but to get people doing it has to be a skill that is taught to future public health administrators, and there has to be the academic side that is continually improving the methods for legal surveillance. Teaching it as an interdisciplinary class is a good way to make that happen.
Micah Berman is an Associate Professor of Public Health and Law at the Ohio State University.
